Italian gardens vary widely according to their historical date and geographic location. This collection of essays approaches Italian gardens of all periods, from the Middle Ages to modern times, and it ranges widely throughout the peninsula, from Genoa to Sicily, the Veneto to Liguria, and Ferrara to Florence. The authors are a distinguished group of Italian, American, English and German scholars, with different backgrounds in art history, literature, architecture, planning and cultural history. Their explorations of the subject from these different perspectives illuminate not only their own disciplines, but are concerned to make many interesting connections between garden art and the politics of nationalism, between the art of gardens and urban infrastructure, between cultural movements like freemasonry and site planning, between design and planting materials.
This was the first multi-disciplinary study of the dissemination of Italian culture in northern Europe during the long eighteenth century (1689–1815). The book covers a diverse range of artists, actors and musicians who left Italy during the eighteenth century to seek work beyond the Alps in locations such as London, St Petersburg, Dresden, Stockholm and Vienna. First published in 1999, the book investigates the careers of important artists such as Amigoni, Canaletto and Rosalba Carriera, as well as opera singers, commedia dell'arte performers and librettists. However, it also considers key themes such as social and friendship networks, itinerancy, the relationships between court and market cultures, the importance of religion and politics to the reception of culture, the evolution of taste, the role of gender in the reception of art, the diversity of modes and genres, and the reception of Italian artists and performers outside Italy.
This was the first multi-disciplinary study of the dissemination of Italian culture in northern Europe during the long eighteenth century (1689–1815). The book covers a diverse range of artists, actors and musicians who left Italy during the eighteenth century to seek work beyond the Alps in locations such as London, St Petersburg, Dresden, Stockholm and Vienna. First published in 1999, the book investigates the careers of important artists such as Amigoni, Canaletto and Rosalba Carriera, as well as opera singers, commedia dell'arte performers and librettists. However, it also considers key themes such as social and friendship networks, itinerancy, the relationships between court and market cultures, the importance of religion and politics to the reception of culture, the evolution of taste, the role of gender in the reception of art, the diversity of modes and genres, and the reception of Italian artists and performers outside Italy.
This innovative environmental history of the long-lived European chestnut tree and its woods offers valuable perspectives on the human transition from the Roman to the medieval world in Italy. Integrating evidence from botanical and literary sources, individual charters and case studies of specific communities, the book traces fluctuations in the size and location of Italian chestnut woods to expose how early medieval societies changed their land use between the fourth and eleventh centuries, and in the process changed themselves. As the chestnut tree gained popularity in late antiquity and became a valuable commodity by the end of the first millennium, this study brings to life the economic and cultural transition from a Roman Italy of cities, agricultural surpluses and markets to a medieval Italy of villages and subsistence farming.
This innovative environmental history of the long-lived European chestnut tree and its woods offers valuable perspectives on the human transition from the Roman to the medieval world in Italy. Integrating evidence from botanical and literary sources, individual charters and case studies of specific communities, the book traces fluctuations in the size and location of Italian chestnut woods to expose how early medieval societies changed their land use between the fourth and eleventh centuries, and in the process changed themselves. As the chestnut tree gained popularity in late antiquity and became a valuable commodity by the end of the first millennium, this study brings to life the economic and cultural transition from a Roman Italy of cities, agricultural surpluses and markets to a medieval Italy of villages and subsistence farming.
This book relates the history of Italian railways with special regard to their relation with the Italian state from the 1840s, when the first lines were constructed, until nationalization in 1905. It shows that while the Italian state interfered continuously in railway matters, it was nevertheless incapable of creating viable conditions for railway companies. Throughout the nineteenth century 'the railway question' continued to have a pernicious and divisive influence on Italian political life; and because of the low quality of railway regulation, and other factors, the railways' contribution to the creation of a national market and the economic unification of the country was limited. The book also examines Italian regional social and economic statistics before and after political unification in order to obtain a deeper insight into the continuing disparity between northern and southern Italy. Finally, the book places the development of the Italian railways in a European context, and c
In this book, Christopher Celenza provides an intellectual history of the Italian Renaissance during the long fifteenth century, from c.1350–1525. His book fills a bibliographic gap between Petrarch and Machiavelli and offers clear case studies of contemporary luminaries, including Leonardo Bruni, Poggio Bracciolini, Lorenzo Valla, Marsilio Ficino, Angelo Poliziano, and Pietro Bembo. Integrating sources in Italian and Latin, Celenza focuses on the linked issues of language and philosophy. He also examines the conditions in which Renaissance intellectuals operated in an era before the invention of printing, analyzing reading strategies and showing how texts were consulted, and how new ideas were generated as a result of conversations, both oral and epistolary. The result is a volume that offers a new view on both the history of philosophy and Italian Renaissance intellectual life. It will serve as a key resource for students and scholars of early modern Italian humanism and culture.
This book is a major study in English of the duchy of Savoy during the period of the Thirty Years War. Rather than examining Savoy purely in terms of its military or geo-strategic role, Dynasty and Diplomacy in the Court of Savoy comprises three interwoven strands: the dynastic ambitions of the ruling House of Savoy, the family interests of an elite clan in ducal service, and the unique role played by one member of that clan, Abate Alessandro Scaglia (1592–1641), who emerged as one of Europe's most widely known diplomats. Scaglia, the focus of the book, affords insights not only into Savoyard court politics and diplomacy, but more generally into a diplomatic culture of seventeenth-century Europe. With his image fixed by a remarkable series of Van Dyck portraits, Scaglia is emblematic of an international network of princes, diplomats, courtiers and artists, at the point of contact between dynasticism, high politics and the arts.
Jeffrey N. Cox reconsiders the history of British Romanticism, seeing the work of Byron, the Shelleys, and Keats responding not only to the 'first generation' Romantics led by Wordsworth, but more directly to the cultural innovations of the Napoleonic War years. Recreating in depth three moments of political crisis and cultural creativity - the Peace of Amiens, the Regency Crisis, and Napoleon's first abdication - Cox shows how 'second generation' Romanticism drew on cultural 'border raids', seeking a global culture at a time of global war. This book explores how the introduction on the London stage of melodrama in 1803 shaped Romantic drama, how Barbauld's prophetic satire Eighteen Hundred and Eleven prepares for the work of the Shelleys, and how Hunt's controversial Story of Rimini showed younger writers how to draw on the Italian cultural archive. Responding to world war, these writers sought to embrace a radically new vision of the world.
Jeffrey N. Cox reconsiders the history of British Romanticism, seeing the work of Byron, the Shelleys, and Keats responding not only to the 'first generation' Romantics led by Wordsworth, but more directly to the cultural innovations of the Napoleonic War years. Recreating in depth three moments of political crisis and cultural creativity - the Peace of Amiens, the Regency Crisis, and Napoleon's first abdication - Cox shows how 'second generation' Romanticism drew on cultural 'border raids', seeking a global culture at a time of global war. This book explores how the introduction on the London stage of melodrama in 1803 shaped Romantic drama, how Barbauld's prophetic satire Eighteen Hundred and Eleven prepares for the work of the Shelleys, and how Hunt's controversial Story of Rimini showed younger writers how to draw on the Italian cultural archive. Responding to world war, these writers sought to embrace a radically new vision of the world.
These studies illustrate the different ways in which the Renaissance made use of its classical heritage, and how a variety of techniques were employed to transform the material that could be derived from the ancient classics so that it could serve the social and cultural purposes of Renaissance man. The scope of the volume covers discussions of catalogues and editions of humanist works; the humanist contribution to the art of discourse; humanism and religion; humanism and political thought; and finally the contribution of the humanists to the useful and fine arts. This volume consists of papers delivered at the second conference on Classical Influences held at King's College, Cambridge, in 1974. This book should be of interest to specialists in classical studies, Renaissance studies and the history of literature and ideas, and specialists in French, German and Italian studies. The last three articles will also interest art historians.
By extending the chronological parameters of existing scholarship, and by focusing on legal experts' overriding and enduring concern with 'dangerous' forms of common crime, this study offers a major reinterpretation of criminal-law reform and legal culture in Italy from the Liberal (1861–1922) to the Fascist era (1922–43). Garfinkel argues that scholars have long overstated the influence of positivist criminology on Italian legal culture and that the kingdom's penal-reform movement was driven not by the radical criminological theories of Cesare Lombroso, but instead by a growing body of statistics and legal researches that related rising rates of crime to the instability of the Italian state. Drawing on a vast array of archival, legal and official sources, the author explains the sustained and wide-ranging interest in penal-law reform that defined this era in Italian legal history while analyzing the philosophical underpinnings of that reform and its relationship to contemporary penal-
The Renaissance is still often wrongly characterized as a period of religious indifference. Contradicting that viewpoint, this book examines confraternities: lay groups through which Italians of the
Between the twelfth and the eighteenth centuries Italians frequently joined "confraternities" that made them symbolic brothers and sisters to one another. These kin groups launched extensive charitabl
Seven essays reconstruct the foreign policy and diplomacy of the major Italian states in the early modern period. Using a range of models, they discuss such topics diplomacy and government in 15th-cen
This book is a study of convent theatre in Italy, an all-female tradition. Widespread in the early modern period, but virtually forgotten today, this activity produced a number of talented dramatists and works worthy of remembrance. Convent authors, actresses and audiences, especially in Tuscan houses, the plays written and produced, and what these reveal about the lives of convent women, are the focus of this book. Beginning with the earliest known performances of miracle and mystery plays (sacre rappresentazioni) in the late fifteenth century, the book follows the development in the convents at the turn of the sixteenth century of spiritual comedy and of a variety of dramatic forms in the seventeenth century. Convent theatre both reflected the high level of literacy among convent women and contributed to it, and it attested to the continuing close contact between the secular world and the convents - even in the Post Tridentine period.
Confraternities were the most common form of organized religious life in medieval and early modern Europe. They were at once the lay face of the church, the spiritual heart of civic government, and the social kin who claimed the allegiance of peers and the obedience of subordinates. In this 1999 collection, fifteen scholars examine the development of confraternities in Italy, where they emerged first and had the greatest impact. Individual essays explore a common set of themes across Italy from the twelfth to the eighteenth centuries: the ubiquity of confraternities, social construction, and devotional ethos; their ritual culture and civic religion; their antagonistic and collaborative relations with both civic and ecclesiastical authorities; and their role in social welfare and social control of marginal groups. The authors demonstrate how the ritual kinship expressed in confraternities emerged in the Middle Ages and became a powerful force in 'civilizing' early modern Italian society
In 1734 the kingdom of Naples became an independent monarchy, but in 1799 a Jacobin revolution transformed it briefly into a republic. In these few but intense decades of independence all the great problems of the age of the Enlightenment became apparent: attacks on feudalism and on the power of the Catholic Church, the struggle for a modern economy, and aspirations to change the administrative machinery and the judicial system. Yet Naples was also the city visited by Winckelmann and Goethe, the city of Sir William Hamilton, of the study of Pompeii and Herculanum, and of the greatest musicians of the age. This collection of essays addresses a range of issues in the city's political and cultural history, and demonstrates the city's importance in shaping the modern, enlightened culture of Europe.
This 2000 volume was the first attempt at a comparative reconstruction of the foreign policy and diplomacy of the major Italian states in the early modern period. The various contributions reveal the instruments and forms of foreign relations in the Italian peninsula. They also show a range of different case-studies and models which share the values and political concepts of the cultural context of diplomatic practice in the ancien régime. While Venice, the Papal States, the duchy of Savoy, Florence (later the duchy of Tuscany), Mantua, Modena, and later the kingdom of Naples may be considered minor states in the broader European context, their diplomatic activity was equal to that of the major powers. This reconstruction of their ambassadors, their secretaries, and their ceremonies offers a fascinating interpretation of the political history of early modern Italy.
